General

Any software development company which provides software service solutions to customers, has to enter into a contract with the customer, to deliver the agreed upon solution to the customer at an agreed upon price under some terms and conditions, for every project. This contract, called the Software Development Project Contract, binds the company and the customer for the period of the contract by its terms and conditions. As a startup we did not have a full blown software development contract initially and we relied on simple agreements that we conjured up on the fly. However as we grew and as we started dealing with bigger and international clients we had to get a full software development contract. We got this done by a third party and we felt we should share it with everybody and here it is.

We have been running the RequestCD Program for more than a year now. For this program we have been heavily downloading iso's, mostly GNU/Linux distributions. We download either through direct downloads or through bittorrent. Bittorrent downloads are inherently safer because the downloaded iso would be guaranteed error free. However http and ftp downloads results in corrupted downloads once in a while. Traditionally when you end up with a corrupted iso you had to download the iso file again. Not anymore. You can easily repair a corrupted iso using Bittorrent.

One of the most common compression formats used in GNU/Linux and variants is tar.gz. A tar.gz file is nothing but a gzipped tar archive. These days users of GNU/Linux system seldom have to use the command line to create or extract tar.gz archives. But it is a useful command to keep in your arsenal if you are a system administrator.

We recently had to convert quite a lot of Ambili Font based ASCII Encoded pdf documents as part as a project we were working on. With proper guidance from Swathanthra Malayalam Computing, more precisely from Santhosh Thottingal we were able to use the Payyans Unicode Converter for Malayalam for this. As is our practice, we made sure that our efforts would also benefit the community by creating the font map for Ambili font and we are releasing it under GPL v3.

Kerala Taxes recently moved completely to online filing of taxes. To help business owners to efile their taxes, the sales tax department had prepared and released a Microsoft Excel template file(.xls) to be used by the dealers to generate files for filing taxes online. We, at Zyxware, realized that this would effectively force Free Software Users into using Microsoft Office for filing their taxes and took effort into converting this template into OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet Format(.ods)

Setting up Malayalam on Ubuntu or for that matter any other GNU/Linux distribution like Fedora, Mandriva has been progressively getting easier thanks to the wonderful effort of the free software community going by the name "Swathanthra Malayalam Computing" or SMC in short. Most of the patches and tweaks have gone upstream to the OS trunks and most distros are already Malayalam capable. A few minor tweaks are required to set up reading and writing in Malayalam in the latest version of Ubuntu 8.10 - Intrepid Ibex

We provide Oracle administration support on GNU Linux Servers. One of our customers had us set up a new Oracle XE server for them on CentOS. We set up everything and had the system up and running fine. We had also tested everything on the server and verified connection status from clients. Two days after installation we got a call from the customer that he could not open the Oracle XE web administration interface and he was getting an access denied, page not found error on http://127.0.0.1:8080/apex

We recently had to install GNU/Linux on 40 computers at the regional Police Training College(PTC), Trivandrum. This was part of a Free Software Training Program that PTC is conducting currently for police personnel in Kerala. Zyxware was proudly part of this initiative both in training and in setting up GNU/Linux GNU/Linux on all 40 computers in the training lab. We had also prepared Linux Mint cds to be given to the trainees given their non-technical backgrounds.